Robert Buck, a distinguished pilot who in the 1930s crossed the continent at record speeds, flew a light plane higher than anyone had done before and photographed ancient ruins of the Yucatan from the air for the first time — all by the age of 20 — died in Berlin, Vt. He was 93 and had continued to fly gliders into his late 80s.
Mr. Buck, died April 14 of complications from a fall, his son, Robert Buck, said last week.
A retired chief pilot of TWA, Mr. Buck also was a respected aviation writer and weather authority. During World War II he researched hazardous weather of all kinds by flying into it and recording his observations.
His book “Weather Flying,” published in 1970 and now in its fourth edition, is considered required reading for pilots.
Long before all that, Mr. Buck was nationally known as a flying prodigy, going aloft in one-seaters, dressed in a leather helmet and goggles, without even a radio to assist him. He pored over maps, steered by the stars and telephoned his parents after every flight.
In April 1930, at the age of 16, Mr. Buck became the youngest licensed pilot in the United States. Later that year, flying from Newark, N.J., to Los Angeles, he broke the junior transcontinental airspeed record. On the return trip, just for sport, he broke it again. At 17 he wrote a book about it, “Burning Up the Sky,” published in 1931.
By the time he was 18, Mr. Buck had set 14 junior aviation records. These included the junior altitude record for light planes, which he broke in July 1930 by ascending to 15,000 feet.
The red-haired Mr. Buck was known in the papers as “the Schoolboy Pilot.” They chronicled his every exploit, including what he carried in his plane (a Bible and a package of sandwiches made by his mother) and his life on the ground (“he likes polo, hunting, riding and milk drinking,” The New York Telegram reported in 1931).
Mr. Buck’s other speed records included a round trip between Newark and Havana, which he made in 13 hours, 5 minutes, in 1931. On arriving in Cuba, he was greeted by adoring crowds and presented with a 12-inch cigar, which he later gave, as instructed, to President Herbert Hoover.
In late 1933 and early 1934, Mr. Buck and a friend, Robert Nixon, 19, spent three months roaming the Mexican jungle by air, photographing lost Mayan cities of the Yucatan. They were the youngest aerial explorers ever, the newspapers reported.
During World War II, Mr. Buck, working on a joint project of TWA and the Army, went “looking for trouble,” as he often said, piloting a B-17 into snow, hail and thunderstorms all over the globe.
“I was able to put my nose in any kind of weather I wanted to fly through,” he told National Public Radio in 2002. “We’d sit around, waiting until the weather was bad and then go fly through it.”
For his research, Mr. Buck was awarded the Air Medal, one of only a few civilians to receive it, in 1946.
